by Laurie
Navarro And Ryan Krippendorf, from SchoolArts Magazine, October 2014
Communities are groups of people who live, work, and
play together, sharing common beliefs and traditions. Communities also help us define who we are and how we
interact with others around us.
Through this lesson, third grade students created a unique symbol in the
style of a milagro, to communicate a
wish for his or her community.
Milagro means “miracle” in Spanish. Milagros are small folk
charms that are usually made from metal. They are used as votive offerings in
sites throughout Mexico, Latin America, and parts of Spain. Milagros can be offered as prayers for
help with a specific need, or left as a thanks or reminder of a need that has
been met.
Envisioning and Extending Our Ideas
After reading the
story “The Mystery Wind,” by Cheryl Ryan, students considered what problems the
main character, Taba, saw and then the wishes she made for her community as a
result. Then, as a class, students brainstormed a list of problems they knew
about in the community and what we could do to fix them. Individually, students
then brainstormed lists of wishes for the community in their visual
journals.
After sharing some of their initial ideas, students
worked to revise their wishes to be worded in positive ways. For example, “no
littering” became “a clean city” and “no guns” became “safety for my family.”
This helped broaden the possibilities that students envisioned as they
developed imagery for their milagros.
After discussing
examples of symbols and identifying what meanings and associations beyond the
initial image that we see, each student sketched out different versions of the
ideas for his or her symbol, based on a choice from the list of wishes in their
visual journal. Students then revised their plans and pushed themselves to make
a more sophisticated image by overlapping or juxtaposing
two to three images from their sketches. The students impressed themselves
with how much more interesting the ideas for their milagros became when they
did this!
Creating the Milagros
At this point, students took the contour line drawings
of the symbol for their milagros and traced them directly onto 5”x5” sheets of
aluminum tooling foil. When placed
on a soft surface like a piece of felt or a notebook, lines, patterns, and
other details can be raised and lowered as textures in tooling foil with a no.
2 pencil or a wooden stylus.
Students used this to their advantage to enhance areas that would
benefit from having a texture other than flat, smooth metal, such as grass or
the fur on an animal. Finally,
students used colored permanent markers to create color accents on their
milagros. The final aluminum milagros were cut out and included as part of a
multi-grade level ofrenda, or altar,
for Día de los Muertos, however they could be created any time of the year.
Throughout this project, students continually
returned to questions of why communities are important, how their milagros can
be important to the community, and how their ideas and artwork was similar to
other artists who have worked with the big idea of community.
As this happened
early in the school year, this was also an opportunity to teach students about
how to share their ideas with a partner and how to offer ideas small group
critiques. Aligning with the grade level classroom teacher’s practice of “stars
and wishes” for critique of writing projects, the students were excited to
practice this by participating in small group critiques with three to four
classmates, both during the planning process and just before the metal milagros
were complete. Based on the advice
they were given in critique, they students wrote in their visual journals about
what their next steps would be and they were given the time to improve upon
their plans.
Laurie Navarro and Ryan Krippendorf are art teachers
at Bruce Guadalupe Community School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. lnavarro@bgcsedu.com,
rkrippendorf@bgcsedu.com
No comments:
Post a Comment